The
Land Question -
PROPERTY IN LAND

II. THE “REDUCTION TO INIQUITY”

[41] “In this paper it has not
been my aim to argue,” says the Duke of Argyll, in concluding
his article entitled “The Prophet of San Francisco.” It
is generally waste of time to reply to those who do not argue.
Yet, partly because of my respect for other writings of his, and
partly because of the ground to which he invites me, I take the
first opportunity I have had to reply to the Duke.

In doing so, let me explain the personal incident to which he
refers, and which he has seemingly misunderstood. In sending the
Duke of Argyll a copy of “Progress and Poverty,” I
intended no impertinence, and was unconscious of any impropriety.
Instead, I paid him a high compliment. For, as I stated in an accompanying
note, I sent him my book not only to mark my esteem for the author
of “The Reign of Law,” but because I thought him a
man superior to his accidents.

I am still conscious of the profit I derived from “The
Reign of Law,” and can still recall the pleasure it gave
me. What attracted me, however, was not, as the Duke seems to think,
what he styles his “nonsense chapter.” On the contrary,
the notion that it is necessary to impose restrictions upon labor
seems to me strangely incongruous, not only with free trade, but
with the idea of the domi- [42] nance and harmony of natural laws,
which in preceding chapters he so well develops. Where such restrictions
as Factory Acts seem needed in the interests of labor, the seeming
need, to my mind, arises from previous restrictions, in the removal
of which, and not in further restrictions, the true remedy is to
be sought. What attracted me in “The Reign of Law” was
the manner in which the Duke points out the existence of physical
laws and adaptations which compel the mind that thinks upon them
to the recognition of creative purpose. In this way the Duke’s
book was to me useful and grateful, as I doubt not it has been
to many others.

My book, I thought, might, in return, be useful and grateful
to the Duke—might give him something of that “immense
and instinctive pleasure” of which he had spoken as arising
from the recognition of the grand simplicity and unspeakable harmony
of universal law. And in the domain in which I had, as I believed,
done something to point out the reign of law this pleasure is perhaps
even more intense than in that of which he had written. For in
physical laws we recognize only intelligence, and can but trust
that infinite wisdom implies infinite goodness. But in social laws
he who looks may recognize beneficence as well as intelligence;
may see that the moral perceptions of men are perceptions of realities;
and find ground for an abiding faith that this short life does
not bound the destiny of the human soul. I knew the Duke of Argyll
then only by his book. I had never been in Scotland, or learned
the character as a landlord he bears there. I intended to pay a
tribute and give a pleasure to a citizen of the republic of letters,
not to irritate a landowner. I did not think a trumpery title and
a patch of ground could fetter a mind that had communed with Nature
and busied itself with causes and beginnings. My mistake was that
of ignorance. Since [43] the Duke of Argyll has publicly called
attention to it, I thus publicly apologize.

The Duke declares it has not been his aim to argue. This is clear.
I wish it were as clear it had not been his aim to misrepresent.
He seems to have written for those who have never read the books
he criticizes. But as those who have done so constitute a very
respectable part of the reading world, I can leave his misrepresentations
to take care of themselves, confident that the incredible absurdity
he attributes to my reasonings will be seen, by whoever reads my
books, to belong really to the Duke’s distortions. In what
I have here to say I prefer to meet him upon his own ground and
to hold to the main question.* I accept the “reduction to
iniquity.”

*It is unnecessary for me to say anything of India further
than to remark that the essence of nationalization of land is
not in the collection of rent by government, but in its utilization
for the benefit of the people. Nor on the subject of pnblic debts
is it worth while hero to add anything to what I have said in “Social
Problems.”

Strangely enough, the Duke expresses distrust of the very tribunal
to which he appeals. “It is a fact,” he tells us, “that
none of us should ever forget, that the moral faculties do not
as certainly revolt against iniquity as the reasoning faculties
do against absurdity.” If that be the case, why, then, may
I ask, is the Duke’s whole article addressed to the moral
faculties? Why does he talk about right and wrong, about justice
and injustice, about honor and dishonor; about my “immoral
doctrines” and “profligate conclusions,” “the
unutterable meanness of the gigantic villainy” I advocate?
why style me “such a Preacher of Unrighteousness as the world
has never seen” and so on? If the Duke will permit me I will
tell him, for in all probability he does not know—he himself,
to paraphrase his own words, being a good example of how men who
sometimes set up as philosophers and deny laws [44] of the human
mind are themselves unconsciously subject to those very laws. The
Duke appeals to moral perceptions for the same reason that impels
all men, good or bad, learned or simple, to appeal to moral perceptions
whenever they become warm in argument; and this reason is, the
instinctive feeling that the moral sense is higher and
truer than the intellectual sense; that the moral faculties do more
certainly revolt against iniquity than the intellectual faculties
against absurdity. The Duke appeals to the moral sense, because
he instinctively feels that with all men its decisions bare the
highest sanction; and if he afterward seeks to weaken its authority,
it is because this very moral sense whispers to him that his case
is not a good one.

My opinion as to the relative superiority of the morel and intellectual
perceptions is the reverse of that stated by the Duke. It seems
to me certain that the moral faculties constitute a truer guide
than the intellectual faculties, and that what, in reality, we
should never forget, is not that the moral faculties are untrustworthy,
but that those faculties may be dulled by refusal to heed them,
and distorted by the promptings of selfishness. So true,
so ineradicable is the moral sense, that where selfishness or passion
would outrage it, the intellectual faculties are always called
upon to supply excuse. No unjust war was ever begun without some
pretense of asserting right or redressing wrong, or, despite themselves,
of doing some good to the conquered. No petty thief but makes for
himself some justification. It is doubtful if any deliberate wrong
is ever committed, it is certain no wrongful course of action is
ever continued, without the framing of some theory which may dull
or placate the moral sense.

And while as to things apprehended solely by the intellectual
faculties the greatest diversities of perception have obtained
and still obtain among men, and those percep- [45] tions constantly
change with the growth of knowledge, there is a striking consensus
of moral perceptions, in all stages of social development, and
under all forms of religion, no matter how distorted by selfish
motives and intellectual perversions, truth, justice, and benevolence
have ever been esteemed, and all our intellectual progress has
given us no higher moral ideals than have obtained among primitive
peoples. The very distortions of the moral sense, the apparent
differences in the moral standards of different times and peoples,
do but show essential unity. Wherever moral perceptions have differed
or do differ the disturbance may be traced to causes which, originating
in selfishness and perpetuated by intellectual perversions, have
distorted or dulled the moral faculty. It seems to me that the
Creator, whom both the Duke of Argyll and myself recognize behind
physical and mental laws, has not left us to grope our way in darkness,
but has, indeed, given us a light by which our steps may be safely
guided—a compass by which, in all degrees of intellectual
development, the way to the highest good may be surely traced.
But just as the compass by which the mariner steers his course
over the trackless sea in the blackest night, may be disturbed
by other attractions, may be misread or clogged, so is it with
the moral sense. This evidently is not a world in which men must
be either wise or good, but a world in which they may bring about
good or evil as they use the faculties given them.

I speak of this because the recognition of the supremacy and
certainty of the moral faculties seems to me to throw light upon
problems otherwise dark, rather than because it is necessary here,
since I admit even more unreservedly than the Duke the competence
of the tribunal before which he cites me. I am willing to submit
every question of political economy to the test of ethics. So far
as I can see there is no social law which does not conform to moral
[46] law, and no social question which cannot be determined
more quickly and certainly by appeal to moral perceptions than
by appeal to intellectual perceptions. Nor can there be any dispute
between us as to the issue to be joined. He charges me with advocating
violation of the moral law in proposing robbery. I agree that robbery
is a violation of the moral law, and is therefore, without further
inquiry, to be condemned.

As to what constitutes robbery, it is, we will both agree, the
taking or withholding from another of that which rightfully belongs
to him. That which rightfully belongs to him, be it observed,
not that which legally belongs to him. As to what extent human
law may create rights is beside this discussion, for what I propose
is to change, not to violate human law. Such change the Duke declares
would be unrighteous. He thus appeals to that moral law which is
before and above all human laws, and by which all human laws are
to be judged. Let me insist upon this point. Landholders must elect
to try their case either by human law or by moral law. If they
say that land is rightfully property because made so by human law,
they cannot charge those who would change that law with advocating
robbery. But if they charge that such change in human law would
be robbery, then they must show that land is rightfully property
irrespective of human law.

For land is not of that species of things to which the presumption
of rightful property attaches. This does attach to things that
are properly termed wealth, and that are the produce of labor.
Such things, in their beginning, must have an owner, as they originate
in human exertion, and the right of property which attaches to
them springs from the manifest natural right of every individual
to himself and to the benefit of his own exertions. This is the
moral basis of property, which makes certain things rightfully
property totally irrespective of human law. [47] The Eighth Commandment
does not derive its validity from human enactment. It is written
upon the facts of nature and self-evident to the perceptions of
men. If there were but two men in the world, the fish which either
of them took from the sea, the beast which he captured in the chase,
the fruit which he gathered, or the hut which he erected, would
be his rightful property, which the other could not take from him
without violation of the moral law. But how could either of them
claim the world as his rightful property? Or if they agreed to
divide the world between them, what moral right could their compact
give as against the next man who came into the world?

It is needless, however, to insist that property in land rests
only on human enactment, which may, at any time, be changed without
violation of moral law. No one seriously asserts any other derivation.
It is sometimes said that property in land is derived from appropriation.
But those who say this do not really mean it. Appropriation can
give no right. The man who raises a cupful of water from a river,
acquires a right to that cupful, and no one may rightfully snatch
it from his hand; but this right is derived from labor, not from
appropriation. How could he acquire a right to the river, by merely
appropriating it? Columbus did not dream of appropriating the New
World to himself and his heirs, and would have been deemed a lunatic
had he done so. Nations and princes divided America between them,
but by “right of strength.” This, and this alone, it
is that gives any validity to appropriation. And this, evidently,
is what they really mean who talk of the right given by appropriation.

This “right of conquest,” this power of the strong,
is the only basis of property in land to which the Duke ventures
to refer. He does so in asking whether the exclusive right of ownership
to the territory of California, which according to him. I attribute
to the existing people [48] of California, does not rest upon conquest
and “if so, may it not be as rightfully acquired by any who
are strong enough to seize it?” To this I reply in the affirmative. If exclusive
ownership is conferred by conquest, then, not merely, as the Duke
says, has it “been open to every conquering army and every
occupying host in all ages and in all countries of the world to
establish a similar ownership; “ but it is now open, and
whenever the masses of Scotland, who have the power, choose to
take from the Duke the estates he now holds, he cannot, if this
be the basis of his claim, consistently complain.

But I have never admitted that conquest or any other exertion
of force can give right. Nor have I ever asserted, but on the contrary
have expressly denied, that the present population of California,
or any other country, have any exclusive right of ownership in
the soil, or can in any way acquire such a right. I hold that the
present, the past, or the future population of California, or of
any other country, have not, have not had, and cannot have, any
right save to the use of the soil, and that as to this their rights
are equal. I hold with Thomas Jefferson, that “the earth
belongs in usufruct to the living, and that the dead have no power
or right over it.” I hold that the land was not created for
one generation to dispose of, but as a dwelling-place for all generations;
that the men of the present are not hound by any grants of land
the men of the past may have made, and cannot grant away the rights
of the men of the future. I hold that if all the people of California,
or any other country, were to unite in any disposition of the land
which ignored the equal right of one of their number, they would
be doing a wrong; and that even if they could grant away their
own rights, they are powerless to impair the natural rights of
their children. And it is for this reason that I hold that the
titles to the ownership of land which the government [49] of the
United States is now granting are of no greater moral validity
than the land titles of the British Isles, which rest historically
upon the forcible spoliation of the masses.

How ownership of land was acquired in the past can have no bearing
upon the question of how we should treat land now; yet the inquiry
is interesting, as showing the nature of the institution. The Duke
of Argyll has written a great deal about the rights of landowners,
but has never, I think, told us anything of the historical derivation
of these rights. He has spoken of his own estates, but has nowhere
told us how they came to be his estates. This, I know, is a delicate
question, and on that account I will not press it. But while a
man ought not to be taunted with the sins of his ancestors, neither
ought he to profit by them. And the general fact is, that the exclusive
ownership of land has everywhere had its beginnings in force and
fraud, in selfish reed and unscrupulous cunning. It originated,
as all evil institutions originate, in the bad passions of men,
not in their perceptions of what is right or their experience of
what is wise. “Human laws,” the Duke tells us, “are
evolved out of human instincts, and in direct proportion as the
accepted ideas on which they rest are really universal, in that
same proportion have they a claim to be regarded as really natural,
and as the legitimate expression of fundamental truths.” If
he would thus found on the wide-spread existence of exclusive property
in land an argument for its righteousness, what, may I ask him,
will he say to the much stronger argument that might thus be made
for the righteousness of polygamy or chattel slavery? But it is
a fact, of which I need hardly more than remind him, though less
well-informed people maybe ignorant of it, that the treatment of
land as individual property is comparatively recent, and by at
least nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every [50] thousand of
those who have lived on this world, has never been dreamed of. It
is only within the last two centuries that it has, by the abolition
of feudal tenures, and the suppression of tribal customs, fully
obtained among our own people. In fact, even among us it has hardly
yet reached full development. For not only are we still spreading
over land yet unreduced to individual ownership, but in the fragments
of common rights which yet remain in Great Britain, as well as
in laws and customs, are there survivals of the older system. The
first and universal perception of mankind is that declared by the
American Indian Chief, Black Hawk: “The Great Spirit has
told me that land is not to be made property like other property.
The earth is our mother!” And this primitive perception of
the right of all men to the use of the soil from which all must
live, has never been obscured save by a long course of usurpation
and oppression.

But it is needless for me to discuss
such questions with the Duke. There is higher ground on which we
may meet. He believes in an intelligent Creator; he sees in Nature
contrivance and intent; he realizes that it is only by conforming
his actions to universal law that man can master his conditions
and fulfil his destiny.

Let
me, then, ask the Duke to look around him in the richest country
of the world, where art, science, and the power that comes from
the utilization of physical laws have been carried to the highest
point yet attained, and note how few of this population can avail
themselves fully of the advantages of civilization. Among the masses
the struggle for existence is so intense that the Duke himself
declares it necessary by law to restrain parents from working their
children to disease and death!

Let him consider the conditions of life
involved in such facts as this—conditions, alas, obvious
on every side, and [51] then ask himself whether this is in accordance
with the intent of Nature!

The Duke of Argyll has explained to me in his “Reign of
Law” with what nice adaptations the feathers ona
bird’s wing are designed to give it the power of flight;
he has told me that the claw on the wing of a bat is intended for
it to climb by. Will he let me ask him to look in the same way
at the human beings around him! Consider, O Duke! the little children
growing up in city slums, toiling in mines, working in noisome
rooms; the young girls chained to machinery all day or walking
the streets by night; the women bending over forges in the Black
Country or turned into beasts of burden in the Scottish Highlands;
the men who all life long must spend life’s energies in the
effort to maintain life! Consider them as you have considered the
bat and the bird. If the hook of the bat be intended to climb by
and the wing of the bird be intended to fly by, with what intent
have human creatures been given capabilities of body and mind which
under conditions that exist in such countries as Great Britain
only a few of them can use and enjoy?

They who see in Nature no evidences of conscious, planning intelligence
may think that all this is as it must be; but who that recognizes
in his works an infinitely wise Creator can for a moment hesitate
to infer that the wide difference between obvious intent and actual
accomplishment is due, not to the clash of natural laws, but to
our ignoring them? Nor need we go far to confirm this inference.
The moment we consider in the largest way what kind of an animal
man is, we see in the most important of social adjustments a violation
of Nature’s intent sufficient to account for want and misery
and aborted development.

Given a ship sent to sea with abundant provisions for all her
company. What must happen if some of that [52] company take possession
of the provisions and deny to the rest any share?

Given a world so made and ordered that intelligent beings placed
upon it may draw from its substance an abundant supply for all
physical needs. Must there not be want and misery in such a world
if some of those beings make its surface and substance their exclusive
property and deny the right of the others to its use! Here, as
on any other world we can conceive of, two and two make four, and
when all is taken from anything nothing remains. What we see clearly
would happen on any other world, does happen on this.

The Duke sees intent in Nature. So do I. That which conforms
to this intent is natural, wise, and righteous. That which contravenes
it is unnatural, foolish, and iniquitous. In this we agree. Let
us then bring to this test the institution which I arraign and
he defends.

Place, stripped of clothes, a landowner’s baby among a
dozen workhouse babies, and who that you call in can tell the one
from the others? Is the human law which declares the one born to
the possession of a hundred thousand acres of land, while the others
have no right to a single square inch, conformable to the intent
of Nature or not? Is it, judged by this appeal, natural or unnatural,
wise or foolish, righteous or iniquitous? Put the bodies of a duke
and a peasant on a dissecting-table, and bring, if you can, the
surgeon who, by laying bare the brain or examining the viscera,
can tell which is duke and which is peasant? Are not both land
animals of the same kind, with like organs and like needs? Is it
not evidently the intent of Nature that both shall live on land
and use land in the same way and to the same degree? Is there not,
therefore, a violation of the intent of Nature in human laws which
give to one more land than he can possibly use, and deny any land
to the other!

[53] Let me ask the Duke to consider, from the point of view
of an observer of Nature, a landless man—a being fitted in
all his parts and powers for the use of land, compelled by all
his needs to the use of land, and yet denied all right to land.
Is he not as unnatural as a bird without air, a fish without water!
And can anything more clearly violate the intent of Nature than
the human laws which produce such anomalies?

I call upon the Duke to observe that what Nature teaches us is
not merely that men were equally intended to live on land,
and to use land, and therefore had originally equal rights to land,
but that they are now equally intended to live on and
use land, and, therefore, that present rights to land are equal.
It is said that fish deprived of light will, in the course of generations,
lose their eyes, and, within certain narrow limits, it is certain
that Nature does conform some of her living creatures to conditions
imposed by man. In such cases the intent of Nature may be said
to have conformed to that of man, or rather to embrace that of
man. But there is no such conforming in this case. The intent of
Nature, that all human beings should use land, is as clearly seen
in the children torn today as it could have been seen in any past
generation. How foolish, then, are those who say that although
the right to land was originally equal, this equality of right
has teen lost by the action or sufferance of intermediate generations
I How illogical those who declare that, while it would be just
to assert this equality of right in the laws of a new country where
people are now coming to live, it would be unjust to conform to
it the laws of a country where people long have lived! Has Nature
anywhere or in anything shown any disposition to conform to what
we call vested interests? Does the child born in an old country
differ from the child born in a nerd country?

[54] Moral right and wrong, the Duke must agree with me, are
not matters of precedent. The repetition of a wrong may dull the
moral sense, but will not make it right. A robbery is no less a
robbery the thousand-millionth time it is committed than it was
the first time. This they forgot who declaring the slave-trade
piracy still legalized the enslavement of those already enslaved.
This they forget who admitting the equality of natural rights to
the soil declare that it would be unjust now to assert them. For,
as the keeping of a man in slavery is as much a violation of natural
right as the seizure of his remote ancestor, so is the robbery
involved in the present denial of natural rights to the soil as
much a robbery as was the first act of fraud or force which violated
those rights. Those who say it would be unjust for the people to
resume their natural rights in the land without compensating present
holders, confound right and wrong as flagrantly as did they who
held it a crime in the slave to run away without first paying his
owner his market value. They have never formed a clear idea of
what property in land means. It means not merely a continuous exclusion
of some people from the element which it is plainly the intent
of Nature that all should enjoy, but it involves a continuous confiscation
of labor and the results of labor. The Duke of Argyll has, we say,
a large income drawn from land. But is this income really drawn
from land? Were there no men on his land what income could the
Duke get from it, save such as his own hands produced? Precisely
as if drawn from slaves, this income represents an appropriation
of the earnings of labor. The effect of permitting the Duke to
treat this land as his property, is to make so many other Scotsmen,
in whole or in part, his serfs—to compel them to labor for
him without pay, or to enable him to take from them their earnings
without return. Surely, if the Duke will look at the matter in
this way, he [55] must see that the iniquity is not in abolishing
an institution which permits one man to plunder others, but in
continuing it. He must see that any claim of landowners to compensation
is not a claim to payment for what they have previously taken,
but to payment for what they might yet take, precisely as would
be the claim of the slaveholder—the true character of which
appears in the fact that he would demand more compensation for
a strong slave, out of whom he might yet get much work, than for
a decrepit one, out of whom be had already forced nearly all the
labor he could yield.

In assuming that denial of the justice of property in land is
the prelude to an attack upon all rights of property, the Duke
ignores the essential distinction between land and things rightfully
property. The things which constitute wealth, or capital (which
is wealth used in production), and to which the right of property
justly attaches, are produced by human exertion. Their substance
is matter, which existed before man, and which man can neither
create nor destroy; but their essence—that which gives them
the character of wealth—is labor impressed upon or modifying
the conditions of matter. Their existence is due to the physical
exertion of man, and, like his physical frame, they tend constantly
to return again to Nature’s reservoirs of matter and force.
Land, on the contrary, is that part of the external universe on
which and from which alone man can live; that reservoir of matter
and force on which he must draw for all his needs. Its existence
is not due to man, but is referable only to that Power from which
man himself proceeds. It continues while he comes and goes, and
will continue, so far as we can see, after he and his works shall
disappear. Both species of things have value, but the value of
the one species depends upon the amount of labor required for their
production; the value of the other upon the [56] power which its
reduction to ownership gives of commanding labor or the results
of labor without paying any equivalent. The recognition of the
right of property in wealth, or things produced by labor, is thus
but a recognition of the right of each human being to himself and
to the results of his own exertions; but the recognition of a similar
right of property in land is necessarily the impairment and denial
of this true right of property.

Turn from principles to facts. Whether as to national strength
or national character, whether as to the number of people or as
to their physical and moral health, whether as to the production
of wealth or as to its equitable distribution, the fruits of the
primary injustice involved in making the land, on which and from
which a whole people must live, the property of but a portion of
their number, are everywhere evil and nothing but evil.

If this seems to any too strong a statement, it is only because
they associate individual ownership of land with permanence of
possession and security of improvements. These are necessary
to the proper use of land, but so far from being dependent upon
individual ownership of land, they can be secured without it in
greater degree than with it. This will be evident upon reflection.
That the existing system does not secure permanence of possession
and security of improvements in anything like the degree necessary
to the best use of land, is obvious everywhere, but especially
obvious in Great Britain, where the owners of land and the users
of land are for the most part distinct persons. In many cases the
users of land have no security from year to year, a logical development
of individual ownership in land so flagrantly unjust to the user
and so manifestly detrimental to the community, that in Ireland,
where this system most largely prevailed, it has been deemed necessary
for the State to interfere in the most arbitrary manner. In other
cases, where land is let for [57] years, the user is often hampered
with restrictions that prevent improvement and interfere with use,
and at the expiration of the lease he is not merely deprived of
his improvements, but is frequently subjected to a blackmail calculated
upon the inconvenience and loss which removal would cost him. Wherever
I have been in Great Britain, from Land’s End to John O’Groat’s,
and from Liverpool to Hull, I have heard of improvements prevented
and production curtailed from this cause—in instances which
run from the prevention of the building of an outhouse, the painting
of a dwelling, the enlargement of a chapel, the widening of a street,
or the excavation of a dock, to the shutting up of a mine, the
demolition of a village, the tearing up of a railway track, or
the turning of land from the support of men to the breeding of
wild beasts. I could cite case after case, each typical of a class,
but it is unnecessary. How largely use and improvement are restricted
and prevented by private ownership of land may be appreciated only
by a few, but specific cases are known to all. How insecurity of
improvement and possession prevents the proper maintenance of dwellings
in the cities, bow it hampers the farmer, how it fills the shopkeeper
with dread as the expiration of his lease draws nigh, have been,
to some extent at least, brought out by recent discussions, and
in all these directions propositions are being made for State interference
more or less violent, arbitrary, and destructive of the sound principle
that men should be left free to manage their own property as they
deem best.

Does not all this interference and demand for interference show
that private property in land does not produce good results, that
it does not give the necessary permanence of possession and security
of improvements? Is not an institution that needs such tinkering
fundamentally wrong? That property in land must have different
treat- [58] ment from other property, all, or nearly all, are now
agreed. Does not this prove that land ought not to be made individual
property at all; that to treat it as individual property is to
weaken and endanger the true rights of property?

The Duke of Argyll asserts that in the United States we have
made land private property because we have found it necessary to
secure settlement and improvement. Nothing could be further from
the truth. The Duke might as well urge that our protective tariff
is a proof of the necessity of “protection.” We have
made land private property because we are but transplanted Europeans,
wedded to custom, and have followed it in this matter more readily,
because in a new country the evils that at length spring from private
property in land are less obvious, while a much larger portion
of the people seemingly profit by it—those on the ground
gaining at the expense of those who come afterward. But so far
from this treatment of land in the United States having promoted
settlement and reclamation, the very reverse is true. What it has
promoted is the scattering of population in the country and its
undue concentration in cities, to the disadvantage of production
and the lessening of comfort. It has forced into the wilderness
families f or whom there was plenty of room in well-settled neighborhoods,
and raised tenement-houses amid vacant lots, led to waste of labor
and capital in roads and railways not really needed, locked up
natural opportunities that otherwise would have been improved,
made tramps and idlers of men who, had they found it in time, would
gladly have been at work, and given to our agriculture a character
that is rapidly and steadily decreasing the productiveness of the
soil.

As to political corruption in the United States, of which I have
spoken in “Social Problems,” and to which the Duke
refers, it springs, as I have shown in that book, not [59] from
excess but from deficiency of democracy, and mainly from our failure
to recognize the equality of natural rights as well as of political
rights. In comparing the two countries, it may be well to note
that the exposure of abuses is quicker and sharper in the United
States than in England, and that to some extent abuses which in
the one country appear in naked deformity are in the other hidden
by the ivy of custom and respectability. But be this as it may,
the reforms I propose, instead of adding to corruptive forces,
would destroy prolific sources of corruption. Our “protective” tariff,
our excise taxes, and demoralizing system of local taxation, would,
in their direct and indirect effects, corrupt any government even
if not aided by the corrupting effects of the grabbing for public
lands. But the first step I propose would sweep away these corruptive
influences, and it is to governments thus reformed, in a state
of society in which the reckless struggle for wealth would be lessened
by the elimination of the fear of want that It would give, not
the management of land or the direction of enterprise, but the
administration of the funds arising from the appropriation of economic
rent.

The Duke styles me a Pessimist. But, however pessimistic IT may
be as to present social tendencies, I have a firm faith in human
nature. I am convinced that the attainment of pure government is
merely a matter of conforming social institutions to moral law.
If we do this, there is, to my mind, no reason why in the proper
sphere of public administration we should not find men as honest
and as faithful as when acting in private capacities.

But to return to the “reduction to iniquity.” Test
the institution of private property in land by its fruits in any
country where it exists. Take Scotland. What, there, are its results!
That wild beasts have supplanted human [60] beings; that glens
which once sent forth their thousand fighting men are now tenanted
by a couple of game-keepers; that there is destitution and degradation
that would shame savages; that little children are stunted and
starved for want of proper nourishment; that women are compelled
to do the work of animals; that young girls who ought to be fitting
themselves for wifehood and motherhood are held to the monotonous
toil of factories, while others, whose fate is sadder still, prowl
the streets; that while a few Scotsmen have castles and palaces,
more than a third of Scottish families live in one room each, and
more than two-thirds in not more than two rooms each; that thousands
of acres are kept as playgrounds for strangers, while the masses
have not enough of their native soil to grow a flower, are shut
out even from moor and mountain; dare not take a trout from a loch
or a salmon from the sea!

If the Duke thinks all classes have gained by the advance in
civilization, let him go into the huts of the Highlands. There
he may find countrymen of his, men and women the equals in natural
ability and in moral character of any peer or peeress in the land,
to whom the advance of our wondrous age has brought no gain. He
may find them tilling the ground with the crooked spade, cutting
grain with the sickle, threshing it with the flail, winnowing it
by tossing it in the air, grinding it as their forefathers did
a thousand years ago. He may see spinning-wheel and distaff yet
in use, and the smoke from the fire in the center of the hut ascending
as it can through the thatch, that the precious heat, which costs
so much labor to procure, may be economized to the utmost. These
human beings are in natural parts and powers just such human beings
as may be met at a royal levee, at a gathering of scientists, or
inventors, or captains of industry. That they so live and so work,
is not because of their stupidity, [61] but because of theft poverty — the
direct and indisputable result of the denial of their natural rights.
They have not merely been prevented from participating in the “general
advance;’ but are positively worse off than were theft ancestors
before commerce had penetrated the Highlands or the modern era
of labor-saving inventions had begun. They have been driven from
the good land to the poor land. While their rents have been increased,
their holdings have been diminished, and their pasturage cut off.
Where they once had beasts, they cannot now eat a chicken or keep
a donkey, and theft women must do work once done by animals. With
the same thoughtful attention he has given to “the way of
an eagle in the air,” let the Duke consider a sight he must
have seen many times—a Scottish woman toiling uphill with
a load of manure on her back. Then let him apply the “reduction
to iniquity.”

Let the Duke not be content with feasting his eyes upon those
comfortable houses of the large farmers which so excite his admiration.
Let him visit the bothies in which farm-servants are herded together
like cattle, and learn, as he may learn, that the lot of the Scottish
farm-servant—a lot from which no industry or thrift can release
him—is to die in the workhouse or in the receipt of a parish
dole if he be so unfortunate as to outlive his ability to work.
Or let him visit those poor broken-down creatures who, enduring
everything rather than accept the humiliation of the workhouse,
are eking out theft last days upon a few shillings from the parish,
supplemented by the charity of people nearly as poor as themselves.
Let him consider them, and if he has imagination enough, put himself
in their place. Then let him try the “reduction to iniquity.”

Let the Duke go to Glasgow, the metropolis of Scotland where,
in underground cellars and miserable rooms, he will [end 61]

[62] find crowded together families who (some of them, lest they might offend the deer) have been driven from their native soil into the great city to compete with each other for employment at any price, to have their children debauched by daily contact with all that is vile. Let him some Saturday evening leave the districts where the richer classes live, wander for a while through the streets tenanted by working-people, and note the stunted forms, the pinched features. Vice, drunkenness, the recklessness that comes when hope goes, he will see too. How should not such conditions produce such effects? But he will also see, if he chooses to look, hard, brave, stubborn struggling—the workman, who, do his best, cannot find steady employment the breadwinner stricken with illness; the widow straining to keep her children from the workhouse. Let the Duke observe and reflect upon these things, and then apply the “reduction to iniquity.”

Or, let him go to Edinburgh, the “modem Athens,” of which Scotsmen speak with pride, and in buildings from whose roofs a bowman might strike the spires of twenty churches, he will find human beings living as he would not keep his meanest dog. Let him toil up the stairs of one of those monstrous buildings, let him enter one of those “dark houses,” let him close the door, and in the blackness think what life must be in such a place. Then let him try the “reduction to iniquity.” And if he go to that good charity (but alas, how futile is Charity without Justice!) where little children are kept while their mothers are at work, and children are fed who would otherwise go hungry, he may see infants whose limbs are shrunken from want of nourishment. Perhaps they may tell him, as they told me of that little girl, barefooted, ragged, and hungry, who, when they gave her bread, raised her eyes and clasped her hands, and thanked our Father in Heaven for his bounty to her. They who told me that never [63] dreamed, I think, of its terrible meaning. But I ask the Duke of Argyll, did that little child, thankful for that poor dole, get what our Father provided for her? Is he so niggard? If not, what is it who is it that stands between such children and our Father’s bounty? If it be an institution, is it not our duty to God and to our neighbor to rest not till we destroy it? If it be a man, were it not better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he were cast into the depths of the sea?

There can be no question of overpopulation—no pretense that Nature has brought more men into being than she has made provision for. Scotland surely is not overpopulated. Much land is unused; much land is devoted to lower uses, such as the breeding of game and the raising of cattle, that might be devoted to higher uses; there are mineral resources untouched; the wealth drawn from the sea is but a small part of what might be drawn. But it is idle to argue this point. Neither in Scotland, nor in any other country, can any excess of population over the power of Nature to provide for them be shown. The poverty so painful in Scotland is manifestly no more due to overpopulation than the crowding of two-thirds of the families into houses of one or two rooms is due to want of space to build houses upon. And just as the crowding of people into insufficient lodgings is directly due to institutions which permit men to hold vacant land needed for buildings until they can force a monopoly price from those wishing to build, so is the poverty of the masses due to the fact that they are in like manner shut out from the opportunities Nature has provided for the employment of their labor in the satisfaction of their wants.

Take the Island of Skye as illustrating on a small scale the cause of poverty throughout Scotland. The people of Skye are poor—very poor. Is it because there are too [64] many of them? An explanation lies nearer—an explanation which would account for poverty no matter how small the population. If there were but one man in Skye, and if all that he produced, save enough to give him a bare living, were periodically taken from him and carried off, he would necessarily be poor. That is the condition of the people of Skye. With a population of some seventeen thousand there are, if my memory serves me, twenty-four landowners. The few proprietors who live upon the island, though they do nothing to produce wealth, have fine houses, and live luxuriously, while the greater portion of the rents are carried off to be spent abroad. It is not merely that there is thus a constant drain upon the wealth produced; but that the power of producing wealth is enormously lessened. As the people are deprived of the power to accumulate capital, production is carried on in the most primitive style, and at the greatest disadvantage.

If there are really too many people in Scotland, why not have the landlords emigrate? They are not merely best fitted to emigrate, but would give the greatest relief. They consume most, waste most, carry off most, while they produce least. As landlords, in fact, they produce nothing. They merely consume and destroy. Economically considered, they have the same effect upon production as bands of robbers or pirate fleets. To national wealth they are as weevils in the grain, as rats in the storehouse, as ferrets in the poultry-yard.

The Duke of Argyll complains of what he calls my “assumption that owners of land are not producers, and that rent does not represent, or represents in a very minor degree, the interest of capital.” The Duke will justify his complaint if he will show how the owning of land can produce anything. Failing in this, he must admit that though the same person may be a laborer, capitalist, and [65] landowner, the owner of land, as an owner of land, is not a producer. And surely he knows that the term “rent” as used in political economy, and as I use it in the books he criticizes, never represents the interest on capital, but refers alone to the sum paid for the use of the inherent capabilities of the soil.

As illustrating the usefulness of landlords, the Duke says:

My own experience now extends over a period of the best part of forty years. During that time I have built more than fifty homesteads complete for man and beast; I have drained and reclaimed many hundreds, and inclosed some thousands, of acres. In this sense I have “added house to house and field to field,” not—as pulpit orators have assumed in similar cases—that I might “dwell alone in the land,” but that the cultivating class might live more comfortably, and with better appliances for increasing the produce of the soil.

And again he says that during the last four years he has spent on one property £40,000 in the improvement of the soil.

I fear that in Scotland the Duke of Argyll has been “hiding his light under a bushel,” for his version of the way in which he has “added house to house and field to field” differs much from that which common Scotsmen give. But this is a matter into which I do not wish to enter. What I would like to ask the Duke is, how he built the fifty homesteads and reclaimed the thousands of acres? Not with his own hands, of course; but with his money. Where, then, did he get that money? Was it not taken as rent from the cultivators of the soil? And might not they, had it been left to them, have devoted it to the building of homesteads and the improvement of the soil as well as he? Suppose the Duke spends on such improvements all he draws in rent, minus what it costs him to live, is not the cost of his living so much waste so far asthe improvement of the land is concerned? Would [66] there not be a considerably greater fund to devote to this purpose if the Duke got no rent, and had to work for a living!

But all Scottish landholders are not even such improvers as the Duke. There are landlords who spend their incomes in racing, in profligacy, in doing things which when not injurious are quite as useless to man or beast as the works of that English Duke, recently dead, who spent millions in burrowing underground like a mole. What the Scottish landlords call their “improvements” have, for the most part, consisted in building castles, laying out pleasure-grounds, raising rents, and evicting their kinsmen. But the encouragement given to agriculture, by even such improving owners as the Duke of Argyll, is very much like the encouragement given to traffic by the Duke of Bedford, who keeps two or three old men and women to open and shut gates he has erected across the streets of London. That much the greater part of the incomes drawn by landlords is as completely lost for all productive purposes as though it were thrown into the sea, there can be no doubt. But that even the small part which isdevoted to reproductive improvement is largely wasted, the Duke of Argyll himself clearly shows in stating, what I have learned from other sources, that the large outlays of the great landholders yield little interest, and in many cases no interest at all. Clearly, the stock of wealth would have been much greater had this capital been left in the hands of the cultivators, who, in most cases, suffer from lack of capital, and in many eases have to pay the most usurious interest.

In fact, the plea of the landlords that they, as landlords, assist in production, is very much like the plea of the slaveholders that they gave a living to the slaves. And I am convinced that if the Duke of Argyll will consider the matter as a philosopher rather than as a landlord, he [67] will see the gross inconsistency between the views he expresses as to negro slavery and the position he assumes as to property in land.

In principle the two systems of appropriating the labor of other men are essentially the same. Since it is from land and on land that man must live, if he is to live at all, a human being is as completely enslaved when the land on which he must live is made the property of another as when his own flesh and blood are made the property of that other. And at least, after a certain point in social development is reached, the slavery that results from depriving men of all legal right to land is, for the very reason that the relation between master and slave is not so direct and obvious, more cruel and more demoralizing than that which makes property of their bodies.

And turning to facts, the Duke must see, if he will look, that the effects of the two systems are substantially the same. He is, for instance, an hereditary legislator, with power in making laws which other Scotsmen, who have little or no voice in making laws, must obey under penalty of being fined, imprisoned, or hanged. He has this power, which is essentially that of the master to compel the slave, not because any one thinks that Nature gives wisdom and patriotism to eldest sons more than to younger sons, or to some families more than to other families, but because as the legal owner of a considerable part of Scotland, he is deemed to have greater rights in making laws than other Scotsmen, who can live in their native land only by paying some of the legal owners of Scotland for the privilege.

That power over men arises from ownership of land as well as from ownership of their bodies the Duke may see in varied manifestations if he will look. The power of the Scottish landlords over even the large farmers, and, in the smaller towns, over even the well-to-do shopkeepers [68] and professional men, is enormous. Even where it is the custom to let on lease, and large capital is required, competition, aided in many cases by the law of hypothec, enables the landlord to exert a direct power over even the large farmer. That many substantial farmers have been driven from their homes and ruined because they voted or were supposed to have voted against the wishes of their landlords is well known. A man whose reputation was that of the best farmer in Scotland* was driven from his home in this way a few years since for having politically offended his landlord. In Leeds ( England) I was told of a Scottish physician who died there lately. He had been in comfortable practice in a village on the estate of a Scottish duke. Because he voted for a Liberal candidate, word was given by the landlord’s agent that he was no longer to be employed, and as the people feared to disobey the hint, he was obliged to leave. He came to Leeds, and not succeeding in establishing himself, pined away, and would have died in utter destitution but that some friends he had made in Leeds wrote to the candidate for supporting whom he had been boycotted, who came to Leeds provided for his few days of life, and assumed the care of his children. I mention to his honor the name of that gentleman as it was given to me. It was Sir Sydney Waterlow.

* John Hope of Fenton Barns.

During a recent visit to the Highlands I was over and over again told by well-to-do men that they did not dare to let their opinions be known or to take any action the landlords or their agents might dislike. In one town** such men came to me by night and asked me to speak, but telling me frankly that they did not dare to apply for a hall, requested me to do that for myself, as I was beyond [69] the tyranny they feared. If this be the condition of the well-to-do, the condition of the crofters can be imagined. One of them said to me, “We have feared the landlord more than we have feared God Almighty; we have feared the factor more than the landlord, and the ground officer more than the factor.” But there is a class lower still even than the crofters—the cotters—who, on forty-eight hours’ notice, can be turned out of what by courtesy are called their homes, and who are at the mercy of the large farmers or tacksmen, who in turn fear the landlord or agent. Take this class, or the class of farm-servants who are kept in bothies. Can the Duke tell me of any American slaves who were lodged and fed as these white slaves are lodged and fed, or who had less of all the comforts and enjoyments of life?

**Portree, Isle of Skye.

The slaveholders of the South never, in any case that I have heard of, interfered with the religion of the slaves, and the Duke of Argyll will doubtless admit that this is a power which one man ought not to have over another. Yet he must know that at the disruption of the Scottish Church, some forty years ago, Scottish proprietors not merely evicted tenants who joined the Free Church (and in many cases eviction meant ruin and death), but absolutely refused sites for churches and even permission for the people to stand upon the land and worship God according to the dictates of their conscience. Hugh Miller has told, in “The Cruise of the Betsy,” how one minister, denied permission to live on the land, had to make his home on the sea in a small boat. Large congregations had to worship on mountain roadsides without shelter from storm and sleet, and even on the sea-shore, where the tide flowed around their knees as they took the communion. But perhaps the slavishness which has been engendered in Scotland by land monopoly is not better illustrated than in the case where, after keeping them off [70] his land for more than six years, a Scottish duke allowed a congregation the use of a gravel-pit for purposes of worship, whereupon they sent him a resolution of thanks!

In the large cities tyranny of this kind cannot, of course, be exercised, but it is in the large cities that the slavery resulting from the reduction of land to private ownership assumes the darkest shades. Negro slavery had its horrors, but they were not so many or so black as those constantly occurring in such cities. Their own selfish interests, if not their human sympathies or the restraint of public opinion, would have prevented the owners of negro slaves from lodging and feeding and working them as many of the so-called free people in the centers of civilization are lodged and fed and worked.

With all allowance for the prepossessions of a great landlord, it is difficult to understand how the Duke of Argyll can regard as an animating scene the history of agricultural improvement in Scotland since 1745. From the date mentioned, and the fact that he is a Highlander, I presume that he refers mainly to the Highlands. But as a parallel to calling this history “animating,” I can think of nothing so close as the observation of an economist of the Duke’s school, who, in an account of a visit to Scotland, a generation or so ago, spoke of the pleasure with which, in a workhouse, he had seen “both sexes and all ages, even to infants of two and three years, earning their living by picking oakum,” or as the expression of pride with which a Polish noble, in the last century, pointed out to an English visitor some miserable-looking creatures who, he said, were samples of the serfs, any one of whom he could kick as he pleased!

“Thousands and thousands of acres,” says the Duke, “have been reclaimed from barren wastes; ignorance has given place to science, and barbarous customs of immemorial strength have been replaced by habits of intelli- [71] gence and business.” This is one side of the picture, but unfortunately there is another side—chieftains taking advantage of the reverential affection of their clansmen, and their ignorance of a foreign language and a foreign law, to reduce those clansmen to a condition of virtual slavery; to rob them of the land which by immemorial custom they had enjoyed; to substitute for the mutual tie that bound chief to vassal and vassal to chief, the cold maxims of money-making greed; to drive them from their homes that sheep might have place, or to hand them over to the tender mercies of a great farmer.

“There has been grown,” says the Duke, “more corn, more potatoes, more turnips; there has been produced more milk, more butter, more cheese, more beef, more mutton, more pork, more fowls and eggs.” But what becomes of them? The Duke must know that the ordinary food of the common people is meal and potatoes; that of these many do not get enough; that many would starve outright if they were not kept alive by charity. Even the wild meat which their fathers took freely, the common people cannot now touch. A Highland poor-law physician, whose district is on the estate of a prominent member of the Liberal party, was telling me recently of the miserable poverty of the people among whom his official duties lie, and how insufficient and monotonous food was beginning to produce among them diseases like the pellagra in Italy. When I asked him if they could not, despite the gamekeepers, take for themselves enough fish and game to vary their diet, “They never think of it,” he replied; “they are too cowed. Why, the moment any one of them was even suspected of cultivating a taste for trout or grouse, he would be driven off the estate like a mad dog.”

Besides the essays and journals referred to by the Duke of Argyll, there is another publication, which any one [72] wishing to be informed on the subject may read with advantage, though not with pleasure. It is entitled “Highland Clearances,” and is published in Inverness by A. McKenzie. There is nothing in savage life more cold-bloodedly atrocious than the warfare here recorded as carried on against the clansmen by those who were their hereditary protectors. The burning of houses; the ejection of old and young; the tearing down of shelters put up to shield women with child and tender infants from the bitter night blast; the threats of similar treatment against all who should give them hospitality; the forcing of poor helpless creatures into emigrant ships which carried them to strange lands and among a people of whose tongue they were utterly ignorant, to die in many cases like rotten sheep or to be reduced to utter degradation. An animating scene truly! Great districts once peopled with a race, rude it may be and slavish to their chiefs, but still a race of manly virtues, brave, kind, and hospitable—now tenanted only by sheep or cattle, by grouse or deer! No one can read of the atrocities perpetrated upon the Scottish people, during what is called “the improvement of the Highlands,” without feeling something like utter contempt for men who, lions abroad, were such sheep at home that they suffered these outrages without striking a blow, even if an ineffectual one. But the explanation of this reveals a lower depth in the “reduction to iniquity.” The reason of the tame submission of the Highland people to outrages which should have nerved the most timid is to be found in the prostitution of their religion. The Highland people are a deeply religious people, and during these evictions their preachers preached to them that their trials were the visitations of the Almighty and must be submitted to under the penalty of eternal damnation!

[73] I met accidentally in Scotland, recently, a lady of the small landlord class, and the conversation turned upon the poverty of the Highland people. “Yes, they are poor,” she said, “but they deserve to be poor; they are so dirty. I have no sympathy with women who won’t keep their houses neat and their children tidy.”

I suggested that neatness could hardly be expected from women who every day had to trudge for miles with creels of peat and seaweed on their backs.

“Yes,” she said, “they do have to work hard. But that is not so sad as the hard lives of the horses. Did you ever think of the horses? They have to work all their lives—till they can’t work any longer. It makes me sad to think of it. There ought to be big farms where horses should be turned out after they had worked some years, so that they might have time to enjoy themselves before they died.”

“But the people?” I interposed. “They, too, have to work till they can’t work longer.”

“Oh, yes!” she replied, “but the people have souls, and even if they do have a hard time of it here, they will, if they are good, go to heaven when they die, and be happy hereafter. But the poor beasts have no souls, and if they don’t enjoy themselves here, they have no chance of enjoying themselves at all. It is too bad!”

The woman was in sober earnest. And I question if she did not fairly represent much that has been taught in Scotland as Christianity. But at last, thank God! the day is breaking, and the blasphemy that has been preached as religion will not be heard much longer. The manifesto of the Scottish Land Restoration League, calling upon the Scottish people to bind themselves together in solemn league and covenant for the extirpation of the sin and shame of landlordism is a lark’s note in the dawn.

[74] As in Scotland so elsewhere. I have spoken particularly of Scotland only because the Duke does so. But everywhere that our civilization extends the same primary injustice is bearing the same evil fruits. And everywhere the same spirit is rising, the same truth is beginning to force its way.